The Company We Keep (9 page)

When I open my eyes, Natasha is standing above me. “Come,” she says. I follow her outside. The tarmac is slick with an inch of new snow. We walk past a blackened plane, the landing gear on one side collapsed, the wing dipped in the snow. I’ve noticed it before on other trips. It’s been there a year, ever since it burned
up in an electrical fire. I follow a few steps behind Natasha as she threads her way through half a dozen airplanes. At last we come to one with its engines running, the cabin lights on. I can see passengers in the windows. Natasha points at the stairway leading to the back door. “Go,” she says. “Go to Dushanbe.” It sounds more like a curse than a farewell. I do as I’m told, though, and Natasha turns around and walks back the way we came.

As soon as I step into the plane, I’m surprised to see it filled with blond and blue-eyed Russians, a third of them children. Many are in short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts and straw hats. I can’t see a single black-haired Tajik.

The stewardess has decided I’m the one who’s held up her plane, and she’s not happy about it. I try to look as stupid and innocent as I can, and follow her to the back of the plane, where she points me to a jumpseat.

I don’t know why, but I get this nasty, unfounded suspicion that Natasha, the KGB, maybe even Leah, have deliberately put me on the wrong flight, to the Black Sea or whatever beach resort these people are going to, someplace from which it will be almost impossible to return to Dushanbe. Explaining this to headquarters is going to be tough.

Then, ten minutes after the plane takes off, the pilot comes over the PA system and announces there will be an unscheduled stop before we get to—
Bombay, India!
When he says the stop is Dushanbe, a wave of consternation passes through the cabin, something between disbelief and terror. Everyone talks excitedly. One man shouts something toward the cockpit that I don’t understand. It takes the stewardess ten minutes of running up and down the aisles to calm everyone down.

I finally understand what’s happened. The KGB has commandeered the plane, a vacation charter. And now the passengers, rather than spending tomorrow on an Indian beach, face the prospect of getting caught in a civil war. I put my head against the
bulkhead pretending to sleep, as if none of this has anything to do with me.

I wake up as the plane starts to descend. It’s dawn, and I can see the pink tips of the Pamirs. The other passengers are mostly asleep, seemingly at peace with their fate. A couple of minutes later there’s a hard bump and the roar of the reverse thrusters. The plane turns around and taxis to the terminal. No one’s in sight, and there isn’t a light on anywhere, including in the control tower. Leah was right about the airport being closed.

Without saying a word, the stewardess opens the rear door for me. I throw my bag down on the tarmac and jump down after it. As soon as I’m clear, the plane lurches forward, heads down the runway, and takes off. The airport’s now as silent as the grave.

The terminal doors are locked closed, as are the perimeter gates. I find a low section of the fence, throw my duffel bag over, and climb over after it.

As I walk to the Oktyabrskaya in the breaking dawn, I decide two things: one, Tajikistan is like riding a roller coaster in the pitch-black dark of night; two, the KGB is connected to the machine. Unless I intend to leave this place as blind as when I arrived, I need a KGB officer to educate me.

Athens, Greece:
DAYNA

A
s soon as we’re through the door of the seedy little taverna, Jacob and I spot our inside officer. He’s twenty-something, sitting at a table in the back, facing the entrance. In his penny loafers, white button-down oxford shirt, and khakis, he looks like he was recruited at a frat party. He introduces himself as Tom, but why believe that?

He looks at us as if he’s fallen in with bad company, and I suppose we do look the part. I’m in ripped and mended jeans and a faded T-shirt; Jacob, a lanky blond Dutchman with dirty hair, is wearing some sort of weird smock and a pair of filthy sandals. A bandanna is tied around his neck. Although Jacob lives in Washington when he’s not on the road, married to a prominent
lawyer, he easily and convincingly slips into rootless Eurotrash. The two of us must look like we’ve just hitchhiked across Africa or something.

When the waiter comes over, Jacob and I order souvlaki, Tom a coffee. Tom doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s irritated we ordered lunch. He looks from Jacob to me and says he wants to make it short because he needs to get back to the embassy for some meeting.

Tom pushes his coffee aside without taking a sip and leans across the table so there’s no possibility anyone can hear us. “Can you watch this place?” he asks. He pulls a piece of paper out of his pants pocket and turns it around so we can read it. “It’s a house in Koukaki.”

Jacob and I memorize the address.

“Stay as far away from the house as you can. Like about five blocks away. This is very much a go-easy thing.”

“And do what?” Jacob asks.

Tom turns around to watch as a couple walks in the door. They look English. He waits for them to sit down out of earshot before he starts again.

“And whatever you do, don’t take pictures. Don’t even take a camera with you. Just find out what the neighborhood’s like. But no, repeat no, pictures—17N are cold-blooded murderers.”

I bite my tongue. This is what we do for a living: take pictures without anyone seeing us do it. It also annoys me that he talks as if we don’t know what November 17 is, the Greek terrorist group that assassinated a CIA operative here in 1975. I concentrate on my souvlaki.

It was a little after ten on December 23, 1975, when the driver pulled up in front of the Athens villa of Richard Welch. Welch
told the driver he and his wife would walk the rest of the way. The driver got out to open the gate for them.

The Welches were coming back from a reception, happy that the Christmas season was winding down. It had been pretty much dinner parties and cocktails every night for the last month. They still had not gotten used to the Greek custom of eating late.

A Harvard-trained classicist and fluent in modern Greek, Welch had joined the CIA when America’s elite still believed in careers in intelligence. Now his star was on the rise. Athens was an important assignment. Two years here, and he could pretty much count on getting a flagship posting.

Just as the driver swung the gate open, a car pulled up behind the Welches. Two men got out. The chauffer would later say one was tall and the other short. But that was all he could see. They were just shapes, dark on dark. The tall man walked toward Welch and told him in Greek to put his hands up in the air. The short one covered Mrs. Welch with his pistol.

The tall man fired three quick shots into Welch’s chest. He and the other man walked back to their car and drove away. Welch died on the spot. The police found casings on the ground but none with a fingerprint.

A group calling itself November 17, or 17N as it would become known, claimed responsibility in a communiqué. No one had heard of the group, but the communiqué made it clear from where it took its name: November 17, 1973, the day the Greek military junta violently put down a demonstration at Athens’s polytechnic school. Subsequent communiqués led to the belief that 17N held some odd Trotskyite ideology, and, needless to say, the United States was its main enemy.

Welch was the first of more than a dozen similar assassinations, many with the same .45 semi-automatic, which put 17N near the top of the CIA’s target list. But we are still struggling to know just
the basics, even the name of 17N’s leader. Each and every lead, no matter how tenuous or implausible, has to be followed up on. That’s what Jacob and I are here to do, all the while trying to make ourselves as invisible as 17N.

The next morning Jacob and I start out for Koukaki early enough so people will still be on the street going to work, but we catch rush-hour traffic on Konstantinou Avenue and end up lost. By the time we get to the 17N house’s street, the neighborhood is quiet—we don’t have the protective screen of people on the street we were counting on. The only person in view is an old woman in a black shawl hanging laundry on a second-floor balcony of a house next to the 17N house. There’s an occasional passing car, but that’s pretty much it.

Jacob finds a parking place fifty yards down the street from the 17N house, but a truck partly blocks our view. Jacob starts to move the car, but I tell him to let it go. We should do what Tom said, and only get a feel for the street. I watch the house for a while and then notice that Jacob has his camera out, loading it with film. “Come on, no pictures,” I say. I look around to make sure no one is looking at us.

Jacob mumbles something in Dutch about Tom and clicks the camera shut, the film loaded. He’s fiddling with a jacket on the dash, which he’s going to use to conceal the camera, when I see a flatbed truck backing down the street, loaded with twenty sacks of something. The truck stops in front of the 17N house, and someone comes out to help unload it. Jacob sees it too. “I thought this was just a house,” he says. He starts up the car and drives around the block to get a better view from the opposite end of the street.

Jacob pulls halfway into the drive of a shuttered garage, giving us a good view of the house and the truck. We’re too close, but the men unloading the truck are too busy to notice us. “It’s fertilizer,
I think,” Jacob says. It’s the same thing I’m thinking. The stuff is spilling out of the seams, a burnt umber.

Fertilizer is the main ingredient for the homemade explosive known as ammonium nitrate fuel oil, or ANFO. The first time it was used as a terrorist bomb was in 1970, when a part-time student at the University of Wisconsin blew up the physics department, killing a researcher and knocking down half the building. The bomber had found the formula in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Since then, ANFO has become one of the cheapest and most lethal terrorist explosives.

Jacob puts a telephoto lens on the camera while I lean back as far as I can to give him a clean shot of the writing on the bags. A shadow falling across the car and my body block anyone from seeing the camera.

The next day I hand Tom a roll of Agfa color film.

“What’s this?” He holds it in his hand as if it were a vial of poison.

“There wasn’t a choice. We think the house just got a load of fertilizer.”

“I told you
no
pictures.” Tom tugs at his earlobe, obviously dreading how he’s going to explain this to his boss. He looks at the film roll in his hand. “What am I going to do with it?” The question is directed more at himself than at me.

“Did anyone see you taking the pictures?” he asks.

I tell him we’ll only know if it’s fertilizer when we develop the film.

Tom pockets the film. “I sure hope it’s fertilizer, or we’re all going home.”

The next morning Tom tells us to settle in for a very long stay in Athens. They want full coverage on the Koukaki house. Tom won’t confirm that what we photographed was fertilizer, but I’ve learned to live with the CIA belief that the fewer people who know a secret, the less chance it has of slipping out the door.